Pros
Media and violence have had a long history together.
From fictional war films to the real life images
broadcasted from Vietnam and more recently Iraq, media
has brought violence into our homes for years. Video
games are the latest medium that introduce violent
images to society. Violence in video games has been
blamed, by some, for the increased aggression among
youths today. Many studies have attempted to prove the
relation of violent video games to increased
aggression in humans, but results have been mixed at
best. While understanding any ties between games and
aggression will be useful, the major problem arises,
in my opinion, when people start baselessly blaming
acts of violence on video games.
Researchers, while generally meaning well, have misled
those people that they are supposed to inform. Many
studies that have been completed in the hopes of
better understanding the relation, if any, between
violent video games and violence in society.
Laboratory studies have proven inconclusive. For every
one proving a link between video games and violence
there are two or three that showed mixed resfults. A
study by Keren E. Dill, published in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology blatantly blames an
American tragedy on video games.
(http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp784772.html) In
the studies abstract the author writes:
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
launched an assault on Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colorado, murdering 13 and wounding 23
before turning the guns on themselves. Although it is
impossible to know exactly what caused these teens to
attack their own classmates and teachers, a number of
factors probably were involved. One possible
contributing factor is violent video games.
The study then goes on to describe a laboratory study
linking exposure to violent media and increased
aggressive behavior. The study leaves the reader with
a huge gap, though, between aggressive behavior in the
lab and premeditatedly purchasing a gun and walking in
to a high school and shooting people dead. Most, if
not all, the studies on violence in video games and
its relation to human behavior have been co relational
studies, meaning a study can merely prove that there
is some degree of possibility that video game violence
leads to aggression and can not provide a definitive
answer. Thus, there is no scientific proof that
violence in video games leads to aggressive behavior,
and defiantly no proof that doom contributed to the
tragedy at columbine.
More proof that violence in video games should not be
related to violent behaviors in humans are statistical
in nature. The Bureau of Justice statistic’s show that
homicide rate per thousand people has been declining
since 1995.